While it is easy to point out when people are getting things wrong - IMHO or in your opinion - it may serve a greater purpose to examine why things may go so utterly wrong as they often do, especially when we’re speaking about software development.

Software development is mostly about communication. Whether it is communicating with a programmer to make what you want, or it is telling a project manager to get them to tell a programmer what you want - it is in any case a matter of communicating vision to understanding.

So let us try to map out the different possibilities when facing a decision - or what may seem clear to you, but isn’t for at least one of the links in the development chain.

binary tree

I have chosen a binary tree to depict the decision “right” or “wrong”. While normal interpretation of such a tree is that it is a 50/50 split, let us not make such a hasty assumption - at least we - as developers - should be better than a 50% guess at understanding customer requirements.

In the binary tree above there are only 4 decisions Â which has to be right. If we simplify the model to have a fixed probability, p, that we make the right decision, we can use Bernoulli’s binomial distribution to determine the odds of making s successes in as many trials. In this case the binomial distribution deteriorates into a simple power function, ps.

Given either p or s we can calculate the other if we want at least a 50% chance of ending with a right solution.

That is, if we have an almost unheard of quality for understanding customer communication, then at a bit more than 200,000 decisions, the solution has a 50/50 chance of hitting the anticipated solution.

If we want to be 90% sure, then we cannot make more than 30988 decisions with 6-sigma understanding.

So, let us try the other way around - we would like to know with a sufficiently high confidence that our project meets our expectations, let us say 90% sure. We have identified 10,000 key decisions. How good must the communication then be?

s log(p) = log(x) <=> p = exp(log(x)/s)

p = exp(log(.90)/10000) Â = 0.999989

Which means we need 6-sigma communication to achieve this goal.

On top of all this, then the calculations are assuming that the customer knows and communicates exactly what he or she wants, and that all decision points are uncovered and communicated at the same high level.

The only immediate sane solution to improving the odds is to reduce the scope drastically. It may sound silly, but more having to fulfill 10 things right becomes daunting for most of us. In the binary tree above, we would need to have 2 (10+1) -1= 2047 nodes - the sheer size of such a tree should be sufficient to deter anyone wanting more than 10 decisions.

Reduce scope. Improve communication by shortening the feedback loop.

Naturally, we could reduce scope right down until a single decision - but that would quickly throw us off balance, as a single point makes it impossible to determine direction.

Sometimes I just can’t wait for the world to catch up, for everyday items to adopt to Internet of Things (IoT).

From 2015 you’re obliged by Danish law to secure your license plates for your car with 2 screws - not that it will prevent theft, just that it will make it more difficult, because as we all know, then using a screwdriver is beyond most peoples capabilities. - Sorry, but stupid laws really deserve sarcasm and contempt.

If you don’t abide by the law, you can be fined an estimated 1000 DKK ~ 180 USD

Let’s see which other options might have been available.

We want the license plate to make it possible to easily identify the car for purposes of ownership, theft, debt, and insurance. The license plate will be tied to the cars model, registration number, and the owner.

If the car’s on-board system could know these things, then it could fill out an e-ink license plate, and it could color code the plate on basis of debt, reported theft, warrants, or other such interests. Sure an e-ink license plate would be hacked and you’d see people driving around with Pong being played on their plates.

If the car had a GPS it could even report its location when reported stolen.

If the car could only be started by a smartphone app, then it would be possible to tell whose phone was used to start the car. As an added bonus you could lease a key to someone else and revoke it when they weren’t allowed to drive anymore, e.g. a valet key.

Toll roads could be billed automatically without the need to stop up or have another device in the car.

I know - you could have Big Brother monitor every car, fine everyone speeding, track every ghost driver, every freak occurrence, but then, how bad would that be?

I know - you can’t push technology into older cars. I’m just waiting for some meaningful adoption of - IMHO - sensible things.

Making too many mistakes while trying to teach a concept is worse than not teaching at all.

Don’t get me wrong - I admire the people making an effort to teach and
especially when it is about how to program. But just as enthusiastic I am about those who can, I am frustrated and angry with those who really can’t. Unfortunately there are plenty of the those who can’t who try - that is most likely due to the Dunning-Kruger effect

This is particular useful as the subclasses don’t provide additional methods. Now every employee can be thought of as an Employee.

Violation of Liskov Substitution Principle

When working with hierarchies - which is a natural part of inheritance - then it is important to adhere to best practices such as Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP), which states that if a program module is using a Base class, then the reference to the Base class can be replaced with a Derived class without affecting the functionality of the program module.

Why is this important? It allows any developers using your source code as a library to reduce the cognitive load to only be concerned with the base class, which is another reason why you should program to an interface and not a concrete implementation (Interface Segregation Principle).

The violation is in the getSalary method of Manager and Developer. For the base class employee what you set is what you get, not so for the others.

Let us say that we have a policy of dividing the surplus every month with equal shares to every employee. The code to set the new salary for the employees would look something like this:

Yes, this is ugly mutating code but let us not be concerned with this yet.

If every employee were created as Employee this would work, that is, if version 1 of the library only had Employee, then this would have been the implementation to do the work.

When employees are created as Developer and Manager as well as Employee the code doesn’t break, but the business logic does. You end up paying more than you have made. This is an extremely ugly side effect of not adhering to LSP.

It is incredible that people over and over again seem to think that infinitely many elements can be stored in a finite machine.

Public Fields are Bad

Well, there are no public fields in the code shown, they are class protected fields. While that is technically true, the fact is that getters and setters galore is basically no better. Having this bean structure or promiscuous objects makes it easy to implement in imperative style, and extremely hard to preserve the codes maintainability because you have violated the core tenet of Object Oriented Programming: Encapsulation. Read Why getter and setter methods are evil for more on this.

How often is it required to set the Employee name, Id, or salary?

Hardcoded Values

The BONUSPERCENT constant for both Manager and Developer are hardcoded, that is if one manager is allowed a different bonus percentage then it is not possible. If every developer needs a different bonus, then the code needs to be recompiled.

Unclear or Misleading names

BONUSPERCENT is in the decimal representation, that is 0.2 = 20%.

Bad Design

While I do understand the notion that we seemingly have a hierarchy because a Developer is an Employee and a Manager is an Employee, there really is no reason for this. They are only different - in the provided example - through title, which apparently isn’t a part of the object, and how their salaries are calculated. If an existing employee becomes a manager or developer, we cannot shift their roles, but must create a new instance of the matching object - something there isn’t support for in the code provided.

So if the Employee had a Role associated, then something else could calculate the salary to be paid based upon the role. Naturally this wouldn’t help with explaining code inheritance, and it probably wouldn’t help with the surplus division.

Many years ago there lived an Emperor. He was so fond of new clothes that he spent all his time and all his money in order to be well dressed.

Apparently, today we have a lot of ‘emperors’ so fond of new software that they spend all their time and all their money in pursuit of software solutions.

Visitor arrived every day at court and one day there came two men who called themselves weavers, but they were in fact clever robbers.

They pretended that they knew how to weave cloth of the most beautiful colors and magnificent patterns. Moreover, they said, the clothes woven from this magic cloth could not be seen by anyone who was unfit for the office he held or who was very stupid.

The Emperor thought: “If I had a suit made of this magic cloth, I could find out at once what men in my kingdom are not good enough for the positions they hold, and I should be able to tell who are wise and who are foolish. This stuff must be woven for me immediately.”

And he ordered large sums of money to be given to both the weavers in order that they might begin their work at once.

The hype curve of the potential usages of the product is as clear today in software as they are in this story.

The Emperor sends his old minister to check up on the weavers’ progress. The minister can’t see any product, but will not attest to the possibility that he is unfit for his job or very stupid, thus he expresses the wonders of the cloth.

The story repeats itself with other officials all claiming to see the wonderful product. Finally the Emperor is presented with the ‘cloth’ - and he too is too proud to admit that there is nothing there.

Getting dressed up in the makebelieve clothes, the Emperor starts off on a procession throughout the fair city. Everyone passed speak wonders of the cloth until a little child says: “But he hasn’t anything on.” Resounding throughout the crowd.

I’m not saying that software developers are swindlers - far from it, though there are less than adequate developers for some tasks. What I am trying to say is that people would rather try to keep up a facade of understanding than ask questions.

As Groucho Marx said: ‘It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.’

Silence is golden - unfortunately it is the price of silence, not the reward.

Software is not incomprehensible magic. If the solution you get is nothing like the solution you wanted, then most likely there have been communication issues.

If there is no executive support, no user involvement in the process, then you - the customer - will suffer. Whether this is due to failed projects, cumbersome work processes, or brittle solutions, you are partly responsible.

While H.C. Andersen might have had other reasons for writing The Emperor’s New Clothes, my parallel is the IT-illiterate decision makers out there. I’m not saying that everyone must speak IT, I’m saying that you should know your limits, and if you don’t know stuff you have to do, you should ally yourself with someone who can bridge the gap. But you should not be any less engaged in the production.

If you order a steak, medium-rare, at a restaurant, you would complain if you get a boiled steak, a well-done or a bleu steak. And rightly so. In software it seems you would not complain, just assume that you misunderstood the term, and the production facility - the kitchen and the waiter - performed their magic par excellence.

But this is just when it doesn’t go too bad. Quite often the parallel would be you orderingÂ lemon sole (the fish), and getting the sole of a boot with a lemon on top. Paying the restaurant for their services, leaving the establishment still hungry, and returning the next day for another order of misconceptions.

The book, “The Essence of Software Engineering: Applying the SEMAT Kernel”, is written by Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Paul E. McMahon, Ian Spence, and Svante Lidman. Published by Addison-Wesley, January 2013, ISBN: 978-0-321-88595-1

I am a bit confused. I had the notion that this was about improving software quality through the application of a rigorous set of rules. Section 1.1 “Why is developing good software so challenging?” seems like we’re on the right track. But I find that it has not that much to do with Software, nor Engineering. It seems it is a method for applying rules and visual indications for the progress of tasks by people for people. Which means that to me at least, this book is more about general project management than anything near software or engineering.

I found the tone of the book to be rather preaching and praising of this new found holy grail, the Kernel, all praise the Kernel, apply it to anything and everything. A common phase throughout is: “How can the kernel help you.” The kernel consist of just about 57 cards, but can be extended. Seems like the marketing managers choice for gamification Yu-gi-oh!-style.

I’m all for simple and concise ways of working. I do believe that visual aids can support collaboration and communication as well as bring a quick overview, and that these are needed for projects to succeed, but they are not all which is needed.

Throughout the book the Kernel will simply help do everything, it’s a veritable Swiss Army knife. I don’t think I’ve seen any professional choose the Swiss Army knife above their own set of tools. While the Kernel is lightweight - at least compared to RUP - then there are alternatives, which are even more lightweight, e.g. Impact Mapping.

To me it seems that applying the Kernel kind of looks like Kanban with a “work in progress”-board. But then it also looks a bit like a concurrent waterfall, which could be due to the fact that I read RUP and UML into the stuff that Ivar writes. Both of which were praised. In my opinion wrongly so. UML is great for back of the napkin illustration of concepts, a variant worked wonders in the Design Patterns book, but UML in the latest incarnation seems overly verbose as a modelling language - under the notion that a model is a simplified abstraction of the real thing.

Perhaps Ivar is biased from electronic engineering with all their symbols and glyphs (Try looking for IEC 60617 on Google). But what he fails to realize is that those symbols are really their programming language. For software development, we have our own programming languages, and we don’t need a modelling language to go into minute details - at least not as a document. If you generate the model from the source code you can apply as much details as you want, but believing that a change is applied both to the model and to the source code is betting against the DRY principle: Don’t Repeat Yourself.

Why do have a sense of concurrent waterfall? Well, the cards follow 7 aspects, called alphas: Opportunity, Stakeholders, Requirements, Software System, Team, Work, and Way of Working. While I agree to these, and their connections noted in the graphs, e.g. Figure 2-1 on page 15 (not shown here), then there is a notion of the 5 or 6 steps, and seemingly you can only progress, e.g. from Opportunity :: Identified to Opportunity :: Solution Needed. And while that might be true for opportunities, then I don’t see why Way of Working :: Working Well will stay there until the project is done.

Some of the praise in the book is from academia, and while it is easier to teach a rigorous system, it may still not be the right thing to do - at least it hasn’t helped adding UML, RUP, etc. to the curriculum.

In the praise section, Ed Seymour notes that: “This book represents a significant milestone in the progression of software engineering.” I’m sure that any book is a milestone in its domain, I just feel that this book is a milestone along a different road going in the, not quite right, not quite wrong, direction.

Uncle Bob - one of the three to write a foreword - wrote: “After reading the book, I found myself wanting to get my hands on a deck of cards so that I could look through them and play with them.” I felt the same at the beginning of the book, but now I’m thinking more about which game to play, and how many expansion packs will be published in the future.

All in all I’m quite disappointed with the contents of the book, though I’m sure it’ll get wide adoption, and we will be off course for another 10 years. Some of the contents is true and solid, the rest - apart from the intentionally left blank pages (all 34 of them approximately 10% of the book) - seems to me to be more of an academic solution to something which is only half the problem. It is easy to prove me wrong though - apply the Kernel to 12 or more different and average teams and have them develop successful software solutions on time and on budget for projects around the $5-10 million budget. Public projects seem to fare really poorly, that would be an interesting case to follow. If more than 1 project fails, then the Kernel is not the holy grail, depending on the success rate, we could argue whether or not the method is helpful at all.

I’m more disappointed with this book than I was reading Impact Mapping, which at 86 pages is about 25% of The Essence of Software Engineering, but with more information about applying the method, which is far easier if you can remember the correct order: Why, Who, How, What.

Discussing Programming topics with non-programmers

The other day I was in good company with a business owner, who is also aÂ programmer, and a business controller, who isn’t a programmer. We wereÂ discussing the issues of one of my favorite topics: Software Quality.

Naturally the software must do what it is intended to do, but the hiddenÂ issue, which to me is almost as important: Functionality must be placed inÂ the right areas.

The analogy became looking for $10 in a persons wallet.

To the programmer getting this task, the basic work: Find person, findÂ persons wallet, check if wallet contains $10. Has to be done regardless ofÂ where the functionality is applied. To the CPU the steps will be loaded inÂ sequence anyway thus the “correct” position of the code is another matter.

Now, in real life, if I ask someone if they have $10 in their wallet,Â they are able to check their own wallet and inform me. On the other hand,Â I could just take their wallet and check myself. Naturally this would be aÂ violation of privacy - and I’d have to know where they keep their wallets.

In the same sense, a controller could implement the functionalityÂ required leading to promiscuous objects being violated. Or the objectsÂ themselves could have the functionality implemented. The first leads toÂ violation of Law of Demeter,Â tight coupling, and too much knowledge,Â which in turn leads to higher risk of introducing bugs, higher maintenanceÂ cost, intricate dependencies, and a big ball of mud.

The example is a bit far fetched, but it served the purpose of why it isÂ important to have clean code in more than one sense.

The first snippet the Controller will have to know of Person and Wallet.Â In the latter Controller needs to know of Person, and Person needs to knowÂ of Wallet. Even though there are the same amount of dependencies, the contextÂ for the Controller is much higher in the first snippet.

OOP is dead

A while ago Pinterest suggested I read ObjectÂ Oriented Programming is Dead which is a bit dated, nevertheless itÂ is still relevant. I just think that there are more reasons why OOP isÂ dead - and yet still alive.

First off, we killed OOP by trying to fit a relational database as theÂ persistence layer - this leads toÂ data transfer objects, which areÂ mostly grouped global variables or Java beans, which has nothing to doÂ with encapsulation.

Second, we killed OOP by placing logic in the wrong classes, classes inÂ the wrong hierarchy, and generally forgetting what OOP is about.

Third blow, we apparently insist on imperative styled programming for anÂ OOP, which leads to the issues described above.

Fourth stab, we seem to be grounded in the snapshot state of databases.Â That is, an object in a database has a single state, without any priorÂ history. This is similar to register loading, and overwriting, and isÂ prevalent in the Update keyword. You actually have to twist, turn, andÂ contort the default behavior of an RDBMS to get a history/audit trail forÂ the values.

The final death blow was delivered by Martin Odersky - who also kindlyÂ revived OOP in junction with FP - in his presentation ObjectÂ and functions, conflict without a cause. Well he has done so onÂ other occasions touting the Scala horn.

Rich Hickey - the Clojure guy - seems to at least backup the FP and OOPÂ notion - primarily of stateless objects, and Datomic seems like aÂ brilliant choice for a persistence layer.

OOP is alive

The Object Oriented notion is extremely important as it is what shouldÂ drive SOA services. They should be defined by their interfaces andÂ encapsulate data and implementations. As Steve YeggeÂ mentioned Amazon is quite good at, and Google not quite as good.

I believe SOA is the right level of re-usability of software, and we will have to get much better at it as more and more mash-ups are wanted. That means we have to accept interoperability at a different level, keep disciplined and not query database tables which we know of, but really belongs to another service.

We also have to embrace the functional style - I’m talking REST for webÂ developers - in which objects are immutable/stateless, and transformationsÂ can be predictably run whether in parallel or sequence, synchronous orÂ asynchronous to the client.

I’ve been annoyed by the findings that we - as software developers - have at best an average of 68% success rate, and with approximately a third of these in need of costly repairs, which in my book constitutes a success rate of only 46%. We are not even mediocre at best, and we haven’t moved away from Frederick P. Brooks’ “Plan to throw one away” (Chapter 11 of The Mythical Man-Month, ISBN: 0201835959) Even though he argues against it in the 20th anniversary edition from 1995 - almost 20 years ago. That is - it seems we haven’t really learned anything for the past 40 years of software development.

I know that there are other professions in which the products are declared as successes while they soon after display less than adequate abilities. Vasa, Titanic, Columbus reaching the west passage to India, Apollo 1 and Soyuz 1 & 11, etc.

Let us assume that the complexity of the requested software solutions are normal distributed. Then 68% is 2s in the Six Sigma terminology, or zero nines in the engineering Nines terminology. The only natural division of things into 2/3 and 1/3 which comes to mind is the awake and sleep division of the day.

The complexity of a software solution is quite hard to measure as it involves the actual solution as well as the work done in order to get to the final solution, and that in turn involves the people associated with the project over its entire scope: Developers, testers, architects, project managers, customers, etc. For a parallel to the world of mechanics we have the Invention of Heavier-than-air Aircraft, in which the Wright brothers won over the better funded and equipped team of Samuel Pierpont Langley.

I’m not sure whether Langleys team was Punished by Rewards or they just over-engineered the task at hand. Fact is, they didn’t deliver before the Wright brothers.

I know - usually we don’t have a race to be first, we have a contract to fulfill instead. Perhaps that is why there are so many failures in the business. It is work and not (serious) play. Perhaps it is the ever increasing measures of confinement. Normally when I’m using someones services, we have a general acceptance of What we are discussing, I know Why I want or need whatever service it is, but I’m not telling the service provider How they must go about their business.

Take travelling for instance - I pay someone to transport me and my luggage to some specified destination, but I don’t tell them How they should do it, which route to take or in any other way meddle with the service, they are providing. A cab driver might ask which way to take, e.g. choosing between fast and cheap.

Conversely for software projects, there are notions of “must be the same as the previous”, “must be XML”, and “must have a response time below 100 ms” - while these are demands on How things must be done, they could very well - and in some cases have - impaired the end product. You end up with something as ugly as trying to use Java with twitter4j to store Tweets in MongoDB. Tweets come in as JSON object, MongoDB stores “rows” of JSON. On paper JSON objects comes in and should be filtered and piped to the database. But twitter4j reads JSON, makes it into standard Java objects, which then have to be constructed back into JSON using a convoluted builder. Adding Java makes the simple solution a lot more complicated.

But I digress.

If we on average are 68% successful, then the software around us are the result of those successes. I’m sorry, but I’m pretty sure that my definition of a success is not quite compatible with the apparent standard. Clunky interfaces and useless messages are one thing, but not being able to see your online bank account around payday due to too much stress on the machines. Not being able to log in to a “secure” facility because Java is not the right version - Java has had so many security breaches that I’m puzzled why it is in use for “security”. For extra fun, try doing this using Firefox on a 64 bit Windows box - there are seemingly no end to the hiccups Firefox will have, and will have to be killed by the process manager. Having to click on a message sent to you - notified by sending you an e-mail, that you have a new message - redirecting to downloading the message as a PDF, then having to open the PDF in another viewer, while maintaining the notion in the interface that you have unread messages. Windows not being able to shut down because it cannot play the logoff sound - it’s apparently extremely important that this sound is played.

I am pretty sure we could do better than this - and as these bugs/annoyances have existed for a long time, I have to believe that these are in the 46% of the successful software which doesn’t have to be remedied.

On the graph we have the normal distribution, the red shaded area is the 46%, the pink shaded area is the next 22% - the successes which have to be mended. In total, the entire shaded area is 68% - our success rate.

If the x-axis reflects the complexity of projects, then we’re struggling with the mediocre, which is quite puzzling as that would probably be the projects we get most of - and then we should have learned from the previous attempts, and thus be better at handling - but then developers aren’t the only part of the solution.

I am certain that with higher discipline on both sides of the table during project development we can consolidate 68% and even jump the next 22% to the first nine: 90% - it could be that 93% is a possibility within a few years, but let’s settle for the first milestone.

As can be seen, then the step from 46% to 68% is approximately the same as the 68% to 90% - these should be low hanging fruits, ripe for the picking.

If we can pull this off - and quite frankly we simply have to - this would mean that we would have a lot more successes, which should bring greater happiness within the working environment. It could bring more work as the investment is more secure there could be a higher number of companies trying to implement new projects, which at the current rates would be deemed too risky.

The graph shows the number of tries you have to make to ensure a probability of success above 90% for the three success rates: 1/2, 2/3, and 9/10 - currently we are about the 1/2, if we estimate the successes in need of mending as not quite a success, 2/3 is approximately 68%. Thus to probabilistic ensure at least 98% success rate, our customers are expected to be willing to invest 2x, 4x, and 6x the estimated cost of a project depending upon the quality we - as a business - on average can provide.

More positive work - it shouldn’t mean more death marches, nor longer hours - quite the opposite. More projects delivered to the satisfaction of the customers, on time, on budget, hopefully working better than hoped for.

If on the other hand we can’t pull this off by discipline, better contracts, and better cooperation for all involved, then we simply have o cut down on the complexity of the projects. I know that whether you fail or succeed, you still earn the money along the way - but that is not the way I want to live and work. Return customers - the happy ones - are amazingly better customers, and they are replenishable resources, simply by the fact that they return and thus is not depleted.

If we build services that our customers will benefit from, then there should be no other hindrances to mutual benefit.

While this seems like a nobrainer, a win-win situation, why aren’t we already there? What can we do?

Unfortunately I’m not sure, but to start somewhere, I think we can start at the software development process. I’ve been reading the Danish Quality Model (DDKM in Danish) for healthcare. They have done a splendid job in providing reasons Why things must be done, and What the things should encompass, Who is responsible, but not How - this is left for each Hospital to decide. I really like that approach. The hospitals will require renewal of their certificates at least every 3 years. Furthermore, I read the Bonnerup report (in Danish) “Experiences from governmental IT projects - how to do it better?” ISBN:8790221567 from March 2001 - and the article (Still in Danish) “Authors of the Bonnerup-report 10 years later: None the wiser.”

Usually customers don’t quite know what they want until they see it - sometime though, they know exactly what they want, but have a hard time telling developers what it is. Communication is essential, and short iterations of continuous improvement, i.e. Plan-Do-Check-Act with the customer at hand seems essential. We know that getting everything right in the first try is almost impossible. I don’t think any golf player expects to play a perfect round.

The customer representative must be available, knowledgeable, and able to make decisions in all aspects. This will make the communication fluent as opposed to a lot of back and forth, who said what, and similar issues. If there is a reason to change a color, the customer representative should be able to make the call as opposed to having 5 meetings and a committee approve.

Decision makers must be invested in the project. Outside consultants who will earn money regardless of the progress of the project should be discouraged as decision makers.

Teams - on both sides - should be as small as possible to improve collaboration, communication, and understanding of the aspects in the project.

Project management must improve - staffing, estimates, communication, user participation, and post delivery follow up. It is important to learn from previous and others mistakes. At times you feel part of a Monty Python sketch sometimes the Architect Sketch, sometimes the “Meeting to take action” part of Life of Brian. Boehm and Turner discusses Alistair Cockburns notion of competence levels in the book “Balancing Agility and Discipline” ISBN:0321186125. A lawyer with specialty in IT projects mentioned reading meeting minutes from failed projects stating that “The project is delayed” as the sole content. Not why, not how long, not which actions are being taken to counter this. Later on the minutes would read “The project is greatly delayed.”

Developers must work on a single specifically defined atomic task. This makes it easier to describe why something is added to the solution. A task can touch upon several files, but doesn’t have to.

Developers must use version control. Each atomic task is committed to version control - preferably with the task description and Why it was added. This allows a nice readable history of the project, and an audit of the project at any point in time.

Developers must test their code. Not only to ensure correct behavior of the expected flow and of the negated behavior, but - and this is more important - to guard against future changes. Tests for code makes it possible to freely try alternatives, and if you are stress testing, then it makes it possible to evaluate different configurations.

Have a vision, set goals. It is important for everyone to know which direction the project is heading in, and to know some of the milestones along the way. Accept that even the best laid out plans will fail - they do in sports, so why should we expect anything else from corporate business?

Third party competent people should audit the source code according to these rules and the project description, making it possible to give an adequate description of the projects health - much like an accountant should be able to read a companys ledger and estimate the financial soundness of the company. Third party because we need independent observers to be objective about the project.

If we cannot improve, then it must be imposed that the Minimum Viable Product becomes the Maximum accepted proposal for future projects.

Should we strive for an accrediting institution certifying software companies on a yearly basis? I really hope not.

Resources

Update

TechRepublic had a blog entry IT projects: Why you need to fail more often, and perhaps this is actually one of the reasons why we don’t do any better: We keep on beating a dead horse as opposed to cutting the losses early and learn from mistakes made, both our own, but also those of our colleagues in the business.

I know, it is hard to keep a business running if you terminate projects early due to infeasibility. But no matter how far you go down a wrong road, going further or faster will not get you back on track.

When trying to understand a new concept the important thing to understand is not what the concept is, but why it exists. Thereby getting to the essence of the thing in itself.

This is probably why the 5 Whys is an important tool for root cause analysis and incident investigation albeit it doesn’t fit all purposes. But if it is a sequence of burrowing down to the core of an issue, then it is probably one of the better methods of examining unknown processes.

As in the story about the newlywed couple. One evening, the husband noticed than when his wife began to prepare a roast beef for dinner she cut off both ends of the meat before placing it in the roasting pan. He asked her why she did that. “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s the way my mother always did it.” The next time they went to the home of the wife’s parents, he told his mother-in-law about the roast beef and asked her why she cut off the ends of the meat. “Well, that’s the way my mother always did it” was her reply.

He decided that he had to get to the bottom of this mystery. So when he went with his wife to visit her grandparents, he talked to his grandmother-in-law. He said, “Your daughter and granddaughter both cut off the ends of the meat when they fix roast beef and they say, ‘That’s the way my mother always did it.’ How about you? Why do you cut the meat in this way?” Without hesitation the grandmother replied, “Oh, that’s because my roaster was too small and the only way I could get the meat to fit in it was to cut off the ends.” (I’ve heard it before, but the only text I could find was from The Everlasting Tradition on Google Books)

If you don’t know the root cause you may end up doing unnecessary work at best, but most likely limiting, and in worst case counterproductive and wasteful work.

Don’t ask people what they want or do, but why they want or do it. It’s just as Henry Ford said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” They would have asked for faster horses, because horses was something they knew about, and faster or stronger would make transportation better.

In the same vein, it is just as important to learn the reason behind, when embarking on a new project with unknown entities. In particular when starting on new software project, and especially for project managers on both sides of the table. You need to know what to deliver to be able to deliver it in the first place, you can’t tell a developer what you need, if you don’t know what it is, and you cannot accept or test the thing if you don’t know how it should behave.

If a feature has to be cut it is paramount that you can argue why that doesn’t impair the end product too much.

If a feature can be implemented in multiple ways, then the simpler should be opted for. If you don’t know the essence of the feature, you don’t know the feasible ways, and you may choose a too simple solution - these are the solutions which seems to almost work.

Going back to Ford’s quote, it is important that you know what to abstract and how to abstract it, e.g. “faster horses” to “faster means of transportation” and not “faster animals” - that would lead to trying to hitch a cheetah or a bear to a buggy.

As the character Forrest Gump is accustomed to say: “Stupid is as stupid does.” - if we don’t know better, then we do stupid things. If you know why you do things, you may have a chance not to act stupid.

When knowing why as opposed to just what, then you are closer to the Ha step of Shu Ha Ri, because you already know the mechanics, and you are armed with the path. You may not know which quantum leaps you have to make to diverge to another stable level, but at least you know whether a path is perpendicular to the current flow or perhaps an ever so slightly diverging path.

On a much more pragmatic level, it is better to know why a certain color or method is chosen, especially when the time to change it comes around. Which is why the “why” is a much better comment for source code than the “what” - which should be evident by the code itself. And if you have complete memory of the history of changes, you can check if we’re going in circles.

Some people don’t “get” agile - then again perhaps it’s just me who doesn’t get it. At least here’s my take/rant on the issue:

Software development is an evolution of the software, thus you’re not really ever done - the product may be fine for now, but will later have to evolve to keep up with customer requests, e.g. new rules, new layout, new features. A product is not a boxed-in set of features for a given amount of time and money. It’s a concept with an evolving portfolio of features, and an evolving wish list.

Sometimes you have to provide a solution to a customer in order for them to better understand what they really want.

A project cannot be a boxed development of features for a set amount of time and money, as time goes by and new and possibly more interesting features evolve for the customer at hand. Well - perhaps a project could be to “change fonts” or “change colors” - but there’s no project which requires more than one task, well perhaps “change fonts and colors”. A Project becomes a single iteration or sprint.

There should be no need to argue whether a request should be in a project or not, except for technical reasons. If the request is there, then at some point in time the request will be fulfilled. If it’s of high value to the customer, then it’ll most likely be done earlier.

Estimates are wrong - by at least a factor of 2: I’m not saying we should work slower, I’m saying that we should work towards improving our legacy systems as well. A sprint is not called a sprint because you blindly go along full speed without concern for what you’re doing - that would be a demolition derby.

A sprint is a just a short distance with the goal easily visibly, and hopefully easily attainable. You go along a sprint as fast as you can while still maintaining the highest level of quality, not building any technical debt, thus highest sustainable pace. You know, that when the sprint is over, there’ll be another one. Thus there will be no time for rest, no time for clearing technical debt.

If a better way during a sprint is to refactor code to get a better structure, then this should be taken into account when the estimates are done - and the refactoring should be done. If not, then the code becomes more rigid - quite the opposite of agile and software.

Sometimes requests are disrupting the flow of the current code, then it is the developers responsibility to spot this and remedy the problem, otherwise the code ends up as an exquisite corpse. Sometimes Project managers think they need to shield developers from information thereby making the developers create exquisite corpses - don’t do that. Be on the same journey, work towards the same goal.

Agile done the wrong way: The team should work as a team. That is on the same features in the sprints backlog - if they’re not working on the same features, then collocation is pointless and so is team size limits. The customer should be passionate about the product, and be involved in the development. This is why the customer should not be represented by a random project manager. The developers should be passionate about the product, which is why decisions shouldn’t be made by random project managers.

The question and answer may get corrupted along the way. Especially if
any of the communication bridges are verbal. “You tell me they said
‘red’ but the task says ‘green’ - which is it? Or better yet: Can I get
a hex-color for that?”

Information may be lost or withheld along the way - deemed “not
important” or “not relevant” by any party.

This would be alleviated by developer asking (onsite) customer directly - if the developer could show the customer representative then a lot of other questions are answered so much faster and so much better saving a lot of redoing a feature.

You may think I don’t like Project Managers - well, if there’s no project, then there’s no point in having a manager for it. My take is that the Project Managers, Project Secretaries - or SCRUM Masters - should remove obstacles in the software development process and make sure that the project/sprint gets finished on time. They should not create problems nor prolong the sprint by adding features. There’s probably still need for time/feature accounting thus Iâ€™m not entirely against them - they should just not be in the way of progress, and should keep their micromanagement tendencies and software estimates far away from the development and developers. This, of course, requires developers to prove that they are responsible professionals delivering estimates and solutions consistently and on time.

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